InterMine Mobile

Tag: nlp

This is our blog series interviewing our 2018 Google Summer of Code students, who will be working remotely for InterMine for 3 months on a variety of projects. We’ve interviewed Jake Macneal, who will be working on converting natural language phrases to InterMine PathQuery.

Hi Jake! We’re really excited to have you on board as part of the team this summer. Can you introduce yourself?

Excited to be joining the team! I’m an undergraduate studying computer engineering at McGill University in Montreal, about to enter my final semester in the fall. I’m originally from Philadelphia in the US, and I’ll be hopping around North America a little bit this summer (currently in Toronto). I’ve got a passion for robotics and artificial intelligence, which led to me joining my university’s robotics team to help design and build a Mars rover. Additionally, I’ve had the opportunity to intern at NASA Johnson Space Center in Texas, where I worked on a project which uses machine learning to track sensors around the space station (hopefully it’ll be put into use soon).

Aside from those technical interests, I enjoy soccer/football (both playing and watching), classical guitar, analog synthesizers (just getting into this but they’re really fun and fascinating), and the field of space exploration. Part of me is still holding on to the hope of becoming an astronaut some day.

What interested you about GSoC with InterMine?

I searched the GSoC organizations page for projects looking for a Clojure developer, and this was unsurprisingly one of the only ones. However, a language is hardly enough motivation to become passionate about a project. I’ve never had the chance to work in bioinformatics, but I did have a beloved computer science professor (Matthieu Blanchette) whose research was in that field, and he often spoke during lectures about his research. When I read through the organization and task descriptions I immediately thought of him, and knew that this would be a cool project to join. Nothing is more rewarding to me than the thought of using software as a tool to help others do good.

Tell us about the project you’re planning to do for InterMine this summer.

InterMine uses a graph query language (PathQuery) to retrieve information from the database. My project is to implement a more user-friendly alternative, allowing non-technical users to interact with an InterMine database without the need for esoteric queries crafted by an experienced programmer or system administrator. This will take the form of a natural language to PathQuery translation tool, written as a Clojure library. In addition, I’ll be building a proof-of-concept interface allowing novice users to submit English queries which will be translated and then submitted to the query engine. This simple app will be integrated with the InterMine web app, similar to the graphical query builder.

Are there any challenges you anticipate for your project? How do you plan to overcome them?

Natural language processing is a difficult field, and from working on a compiler, I learned that the key to building a correct parser and code generator is a huge number of test cases. Fortunately, the basic principle behind testing a translation tool is simple: assemble a set of English queries, along with the intended output (in the form of a PathQuery string). However, actually assembling such a set of tests which are useful and demonstrate realistic/important queries requires interacting with actual users in the community. I hope to spend much of my initial weeks working with the community to figure out the syntax they’d like to see supported, as well as the types of queries already being written in PathQuery.